I've Bent Three iPhones Now, And They All Bend In Exactly The Same Place

Bloomberg TVLewis Hilsenteger of Unbox Therapy on Bloomberg

Last week, reports began to surface suggesting the iPhone 6 Plus has a strange bending issue - the phone supposedly bends when pressure is applied to a certain area of the device. The phenomenon has since been called "Bendgate," and several YouTube videos claim to show how susceptible the iPhone 6 Plus is to this so-called bending problem.

One of the first to stress test the iPhone 6 Plus was Lewis Hilsenteger of Unbox Therapy, who appeared on Bloomberg TV Monday to talk about his results and assure that his testing was indeed legitimate. On Friday, some viewers began to doubt that the test was real, since the timestamp on the iPhone 6 Plus before it was bent didn't align with the time displayed on the phone after.

Take a look at the screenshot from Unbox Therapy's first iPhone 6 Plus bend test below:

Here's how Hilsenteger explained it to Bloomberg TV:

The truth is that I bent multiple phones. I didn't want to just bend one phone and you know publish a video that would look conclusive. So the results that you're seeing the first video are actually two separate bends. What happened was, I took a look at both of the video clips. The first one was slightly overexposed but I liked the outro from the second clip so it's just a question of editing the video together and picking a different take.

Hilsenteger says the results have been "identical" on every phone he tested:

"I've bent a total of three iPhone 6 Pluses now," he said to Bloomberg, "each one bending in the identical location right below the volume buttons."

Glenn Derene of Consumer Reports, who appeared with Hilsenteger on Bloomberg, noted that in its testing the iPhone 6 Plus bent in the same spot as well.

Hilsenteger said that after opening his bent iPhone 6 Pluses to examine the internals, he noticed there seems to be an issue with the reinforcement behind the volume buttons. This corroborates with a post that surfaced on Imgur last week, which noted the same observation based on photos of the iPhone 6 Plus' internals taken from iFixit's teardown.

Apple commented on the issue last week, saying that only nine of the millions of iPhone 6 Plus buyers have actually reported this issue to the company. Apple also said the iphone 6 Plus would only bend under "rare" circumstances, making this sound like it's not a problem every iPhone 6 Plus owner should worry about.

Here's the full clip from Bloomberg: